Facebook has acquired Ozlo, a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence startup, to help Messenger build out a more elaborate virtual assistant for users. Ozlo specializes in understanding text-based conversations, and claims it can understand and provide answers to questions that don't necessarily have simple yes or no answers -- what Ozlo calls "probabilistic assertions of truth." On the company's website, for example, a short demo shows its AI assistant answering a question about whether or not a restaurant is "group friendly" based on pulling and understanding multiple reviews. Ozlo's website claims it has 30 employees, and a Facebook spokesperson says the "majority of the team" will be joining Messenger in Facebook's offices in either Menlo Park, Calif., or Seattle, Wash. Facebook is buying the company's technology and workforce, and it sounds as though Ozlo's technology will fold into Messenger's existing AI efforts, though it's unclear if that includes Messenger's existing virtual assistant, M. "They're just going to be working with [Messenger] to continue their work with artificial intelligence and machine learning," a spokesperson said.

One of Facebook's main goals is to make businesses more successful at using Messenger. Facebook attempted to do so last year with the introduction of chatbots, but that has been a little slow to take off. "Chatbots were always a means to an end, not an end," says Stan Chudnovsky, head of product at Messenger. "Our goal was always to enable meaningful and useful conversations between people and businesses. Bots were a means to achieve that goal."

Six months ago, Facebook Inc. said it would open its Messenger service, making it possible for businesses to build virtual assistants that can chat with the one billion-plus real people who use the communications platform each month. Since then, developers have created more than 33,000 such "chatbots," which have icons and nicknames that at first glance might not appear that different from a friend or relative in a user's contact list. Last month, Mastercard Inc. launched Kai, a bot for banks that makes it possible for Facebook Messenger users to check activity on their credit, debit and loan accounts and set up financial-management tools. Another Mastercard bot for merchants lets customers make purchases by sending a Facebook message and paying with Mastercard's digital wallet. Such capabilities may be just the beginning for bots.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Facebook Messenger's new service is a hit with developers. Messenger Platform, the company's new chatbot service, is attracting developers in droves, head of product Stan Chudnovsky said at TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday. There are now "tens of thousands" of developers creating chatbots for Messenger, an impressive statistic because the platform has only been operation for one month. The first new initiative announced at Facebook's F8 developer conference in April was Messenger Platform, which includes a variety of tools designed to assist businesses with the creation of bots for the messaging app.

Despite gripes about the usefulness of Facebook chatbots, "tens of thousands" of developers are building them, Messenger's head of product Stan Chudnovsky revealed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. And, 5,000 Shopify merchants are now distributing order confirmations and shipping alerts via Messenger, showing e-commerce companies are eager to reach the app's nearly one billion users. These bots are getting pretty chatty. One of the more recent high-profile chatbots introduced on the Messenger platform, Activision's Call of Duty bot, saw engagement soar to nearly 6 million messaged exchanged between users in its first week of existence. The problem is that if bots get spammy, they could drown out people's friends in Messenger.

Facebook just released new tools that will let any business build "smart" chatbots that users can interact with and even purchase things from while using the Messenger app. But what about Facebook's own super-smart virtual assistant, M? The bot, which Facebook first introduced to the world in the Fall, got few on-stage mentions during the company's F8 developer conference on Tuesday. And the third-party chatbots that Facebook now wants outside businesses to create might seem to obviate the need for Facebook to maintain its own bot. But Facebook told Business Insider that the company has not given up on M, even if the bot is still "a long way" from being broadly released. Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for messaging at Facebook, assures Business Insider that the company does still foresee M as being its own product.